The calls surprised me, but they should not have. People have been calling to tell me that they think the space shuttle may have been sabotaged. None of the little we know about the explosion shows any hint of that, but I think I know why so many people believe it. I think I know why so many people want to believe it:
It`s because we don`t want to believe that we, America, incinerated seven men and women last week. We want to believe that someone else did.
We don`t want to believe that it was some kind of design flaw or construction flaw or computer flaw or some other kind of flaw.
We would rather imagine that some guy in a burnoose crept onto Challenger`s pad, planted a bomb and crept away, chuckling into the night.
But let`s stop kidding ourselves.
We all know about flaws. We all know about the flaws that kill us. How many times have we read stories about a plane that crashed because of some $3 part that couldn`t take the stress? How many times have we read about a door that blows off in flight because it was designed incorrectly? How many times have we read about sloppy maintenance that ends in tragedy?
Sure, we would like to believe the space shuttle was different. That it was our most important machine carrying our most important cargo. But it was designed by men and women and built by men and women and sent up by men and women. And men and women fail sometimes. They screw up. They goof. And amid all the too-brave talk that is going on right now, we tend to forget that.
I`ll bet my post-explosion lunch conversations were pretty much like yours: All of us sat around talking about how they never should have let a civilian on board, not a mother, not a parent, not now.
Yet, we all knew the truth: None of us was saying these things the week before the tragedy. Then, we were all for the shuttle mission. Then, space was easy.
We could shoot scientists into space, lawmakers into space, even a Saudi prince into space. And, of course, we sent Christa McAuliffe, a teacher.
It is fine to say how brave they all were. And they were brave. But my questions are: How brave did they really know they were being? How brave did McAuliffe know she was being as she kissed her little girl and little boy goodbye for the last time?
Shooting civilians into space was a calculated act. It was designed to demonstrate how far we had come. It was designed to demonstrate that we had moved past ”The Right Stuff,” the era of test-pilot astronauts, into ”The Everyday Stuff,” the era of you and me.
I am sure McAuliffe knew she was not just taking a ride around the block when she suited up last Tuesday. But how much talk was there of danger before the tragedy? How many people talked about how ”daring and brave,” in the words of the President, she was being before the Challenger launch this week? How much did any of them, how much did any of us, really know about the risk?
For years, very respectable scientists have been urging the United States to reduce its manned space flights in favor of unmanned ones. You probably have seen those scientists on television recently. They point out that unmanned flights are less expensive, safer and scientifically just as good as manned flights.
But these men miss the point.
The space program is not just about discovering this scientific fact or that one. It is not just about developing this piece of technology or that. It is about winning.
Many of us seem to look upon the space program as if we were at war. Examine the language that people use when they describe space. It is almost always the language they use to describe an enemy.
Astronaut Gus Grissom, who was killed on a launch pad 19 years ago, once said, ”The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.”
Ronald Reagan said last week: ”The future doesn`t belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave.”
Pick out the words from the recent news stories: ”conquer,”
”struggle,” ”win the fight.”
All these portray space as a foe that we must vanquish. In truth, however, space is not hostile. It is just vastly indifferent. But we have set up a contest, a war, an us-against-it battle, and that is what fuels us. So an unmanned flight will never do. It must be us, man, who conquers.
There is another reason we look at these missions as combat. By setting up space as the enemy, we distance ourselves from what has happened. We can say: Our foe, space, has won a round and now we must struggle all the harder to win.
But we should not look to the stars for what went wrong last week. We should look to ourselves.
